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  • ”We’re going to need some kind of radical break with our past behavior if we’re to engineer a viable future.”
    – Mark Buchanan
    Bloomberg columnist
  • ”A growing nation is the greatest ponzi game ever contrived.”
    – Paul Samuelson
    economist
  • ”On the one hand, it’s politically impossible to stop growth. On the other hand, it’s biophysically impossible to continue it ad infinitum. So, which impossibility is fundamentally impossible?”
    – Herman Daly
    former World Bank senior economist
  • ”This is not about whales anymore. It’s about us.”
    – Thomas Friedman
  • ”I have – over the last five years – quite rapidly become a Malthusian. I have been won over by the data, and I have been won over by the logic of the math.”
    – Jeremy Grantham
    investment strategist
  • ”Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.”
    – Kenneth Boulding
    economist
  • ”The free-market fundamentalists will tell you that more growth, more stuff and 9 billion people going shopping is the best we can do. They’re wrong. We can be more. We can be much more.”
    – Paul Gilding
    author: The Great Disruption
  • ”Continual increases in population and consumption cannot continue forever on a finite planet.”
    – Richard Heinberg
  • ”Our economic activity is at war with the planet.”
    – Naomi Klein
  • ”The truth is this: the Earth cannot provide enough food and fresh water for 10 billion people, never mind homes, never mind roads, hospitals and schools.”
    – Richard Branson
  • ”There is a sufficiency in the world for man's need but not for man's greed.”
    – Mahatma Ghandhi
  • ”We can share the earth and take care of it together, rather than trying to possess it, destroying the beauty of life in the process.”
    – Dalai Lama
  • ”Long-term sustainability requires a materially smaller economy (the pie) shared more equitably (not equally) by a smaller population.”
    – William Rees
    Co-originator of Ecological Footprint Analysis
  • ”We can’t frack our way back to economic prosperity; nor can we unplug a coal plant, plug in a solar panel, and go on expanding population and consumption.”
    – Richard Heinberg
  • ”You don’t have a conservation policy unless you have a population policy.”
    – Paul Ehrlich
    author: The Population Bomb
  • ”If the world is saved, it will be saved by people with changed minds, people with a new vision. It will not be saved by people with the old vision but new programs.”
    – Daniel Quinn
    author: Ishmael and The Story of B
  • ”We’ve globalized an utterly untenable economic model of hyperconsumerism. It’s now successfully spreading across the world, and it’s killing us.”
    – Naomi Klein
  • ”Who’s gonna stand up and save the Earth? Who’s gonna say that she’s had enough?”
    – Neil Young
  • ”Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”
    – Edward Abbey
  • ”Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.”
    – E.F. Schumacher
    author: Small is Beautiful
  • ”At present we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it gross domestic product.”
    – Paul Hawken
  • ”Continual increases in population and consumption cannot continue forever on a finite planet.”
    – Richard Heinberg
  • ”We can just as easily have an economy that is based on healing the future instead of stealing it.”
    – Paul Hawken
  • ”Our economic activity is at war with the planet.”
    – Naomi Klein
  • ”A growing nation is the greatest ponzi game ever contrived.”
    – Paul Samuelson
    economist
  • ”You don’t have a conservation policy unless you have a population policy.”
    – Paul Ehrlich
    author: The Population Bomb
  • ”As I see it, humanity needs to reduce its impact on the Earth urgently and there are three ways to achieve this: we can stop consuming so many resources, we can change our technology and we can reduce the growth of our population.”
    – Sir David Attenborough
  • ”Because of this civilization’s obsession with growth, its demise is 100 percent predictable. We simply cannot go on living this way.”
    – Adam Sacks
  • ”In the short term, we must realize that we have better ways to create jobs and build the economy than holding an everything must go sale on our precious resources.”
    – Dr. David Suzuki
  • ”I have – over the last five years – quite rapidly become a Malthusian. I have been won over by the data, and I have been won over by the logic of the math.”
    – Jeremy Grantham
    investment strategist
  • ”The inescapable failure of a society built upon growth and its destruction of the Earth’s living systems are the overwhelming facts of our existence.”
    – George Monbiot
    Guardian columnist
  • ”If the world is saved, it will be saved by people with changed minds, people with a new vision. It will not be saved by people with the old vision but new programs.”
    – Daniel Quinn
    author: Ishmael and The Story of B
  • ”We created a way of raising standards of living that we can’t possibly pass on to our children.”
    – Joe Romm
    physicist
  • ”In today’s full world, resources are not only scarce but have become the limiting factor”
    – Herman Daly
    former World Bank senior economist
  • ”We can’t frack our way back to economic prosperity; nor can we unplug a coal plant, plug in a solar panel, and go on expanding population and consumption.”
    – Richard Heinberg
  • ”Population is the multiplier of everything we do wrong.”
    – Dr. Martha M. Campbell
  • ”There will inevitably come a time that the society drastically needs to change the way it interacts with the environment, or it will lose its coherence.”
    – Sander van der Leeuw

What the World Needs Now

Written by Dave Gardner on . Posted in Blog

One of the joys of growthbusting has been the discovery that living lighter on the planet is very consistent with other values I’ve come to embrace in my quest to live a fulfilling and meaningful life. A constant goal in my life is to be present in the moment, stepping out of the frantic thought patterns that come with life in pursuit of the high-consumption American Dream. Rick Heller has made this connection and has created a website, www.seeingtheroses.org, and a series of videos to help others discover joyful living doesn’t require an iPad, iPod, iPhone, iMac, a Lexus and weekends in Cabo or Vegas. Today’s commentary in our Limits to Growth 40th anniversary series is from Rick. . . .

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Ian Johnson on Limits to Growth and The Club of Rome

Written by Dave Gardner on . Posted in Blog

We’re in the middle of a series of demonstrations, essays and videos related to the topic of limits to growth. This is to recognize the 40th anniversary this year of the landmark Limits to Growth study, first published in March of 1972. That study was commissioned by The Club of Rome and conducted by a team of scientists at MIT.

For some reason, The Club of Rome has not become a household word. Most know almost nothing about The Club or the origins of the study. I met The Club of Rome’s Secretary-General, Ian Johnson, at an event The Club co-hosted with the Smithsonian early this month, Perspectives on Limits to Growth. Here’s a brief part of the conversation we had: . . .

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Limits to Growth – What is the Club of Rome?

Written by Dave Gardner on . Posted in Blog

This is day two of our exponential growth demonstration. I hope you’re doing this at home or school or the office. We began two days ago with one grain of wheat. Yesterday we doubled the wheat, and here’s what we got…

LTG-Experiment_day2-copy Today let’s double that. Here’s a quick summary of Limits to Growth, courtesy of the Club of Rome. Be patient while it loads, and don’t click below on “Click to Play;” for some reason WordPress is not making life easy for me today.

So, what is this Club of Rome that commissioned the Limits to Growth study in 1970? It is actually a pretty amazing and forward-looking group of people. It sprang from an April, 1968 meeting of academics, industrialists, diplomats and other leading thinkers at a villa in Rome. They were invited by Italian industrialist Aurelio Peccei and Scottish scientist Alexander King (King appears briefly in an historical clip in the GrowthBusters movie.) At the villa they discussed the predominance of short-term thinking in international affairs and concerns about increasing resource consumption in what was becoming a global economy. . . .

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GrowthBusters Australia Tour – Report 1

Written by Dave Gardner on . Posted in Blog

I thought I’d interrupt the series of posts honoring the Limits to Growth 40th anniversary today, as tonight I leave Australia and head home after two weeks of GrowthBusters screenings, great audience response, intelligent conversations and warm friendship. I regret I did not get to see every Australian who has supported and cheered on the GrowthBusters project, but on the plus side I made several new friends.

Had lunch yesterday with successful Australian businessman, Dick Smith, a growthbuster if ever there was one. Dick is fond of saying,

“We can’t have perpetual growth in the use of energy and resources.”

He thinks that’s just common sense. We talked at lunch about how most people agree, but for some reason they can’t make the next logical step, to thinking about whether this would be a good time to say, “Okay, that’s enough.” As we were saying goodbye, I ambushed Dick with my pocket video camera and he offered this greeting:

You may see Dick at the Sydney screening of GrowthBusters next Tuesday night. Screenings remain for Sydney, Perth and Darwin. . . .

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Limits to Growth – Rex Weyler vs. Ronald Reagan

Written by Dave Gardner on . Posted in Blog

“There are no such things as limits to growth, because there are no limits to the human capacity for intelligence, imagination, and wonder.”

– U.S. President Ronald Reagan

 

“Oh, yeh?

– Greenpeace International co-Founder Rex Weyler

LTG-Experiment_day71 What more can I say? This is a moment from a wonderful interview with environmental leader and journalist Rex Weyler. Filmed in June, 2010 for the GrowthBusters movie, but did not make it into the film.

I’m on day seven (missed yesterday) of my exponential growth demonstration. If you’re trying this at home, double the grains of wheat in your container. We had 32, so now we’ll have 64.

Dave Gardner
Filmmaker . . .

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